Chapbook Festival at CUNY Grad Center

Books! I can never resist them, and chapbooks are a special treat, so after several Friday morning appointments, I headed down to the CUNY Graduate Center to check out the Chapbook Festival, which was sponsored by the City University of New York, CUNY's Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Book Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and Poets House, great organizations all.  The three-day festival (March 28-30) comprised a book fair in...

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Abdellah Taïa's Appeal

A novel that I wrote an essay about for Spirale (at the invitation of the brilliant Nathanaël) a few years ago, Une mélancolie arabe (An Arab Melancholia), by the Moroccan queer writer Abdellah Taïa (1973-) is now available in English from Semiotexte/Smart Art, under its Semiotext(e)/Native Agents series, having been translated by Frank Stock. I browsed a copy at St. Mark's Bookshop the other day, and hope to pick it up (there, at McNally Jackson,...

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Remembering Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich at Northwestern, 2006 (Photos by Marion Hanlon)Last night I started to see posts, first via email, then on Twitter, that poet, essayist and activist Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) had passed away, and Googling quickly confirmed this sad news. I immediately felt a sense of loss, as so many others did and expressed in multiple ways, the most common, at least on Twitter, through quotations of Rich's poetry and essays, which will be with us...

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Exciting Literary Events in NYC

As always, lots of exciting literary events happening in New York City over the next few days.They include:Institute of African American Affairs at NYUpresents Critical Voices: Women Writing the WorldMarch 28, 2012 (TONIGHT!)Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Martha Southgate, ZZ Packermoderated by Rich Blint, Ph.D. candidate, NYU, American StudiesTime: 6:30 pmLocation: Institute of African American Affairs, NYU 41 East 11th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY...

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Neuroaesthetics, Part 2: Fiction's Effects

Last week I posted a summary of Alexander Kafka's discussion, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, of Eric Kandel's newest book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House).  In this new study Kandel synthesizes his interests in visual art and neuroscience, producing what Kafka judges to be an important text in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. Not...

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Embodiment Exhibition @ CUNY Graduate Center

I haven't seen Corporealities: An Exhibition of Art on Embodiment, at the City University of New York Graduate Center, which went up in February of this year (and may no longer be up; I need to check!), but an artist I worked with over a decade ago, Adrienne Klein, whose artworks explore and synthesize the multiple locations where art and science meet, did have a piece in it, and you can see a snippet of her and other artists in the show talking...

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"Thinking through Collapse" @ NYU

Earlier this week Chris S. emailed notice of this year's Neil Postman Graduate Conference, which New York University's Department of Media, Culture and Communication, in the Steinhardt Graduate School of Education. This year's theme and title was "Thinking through Collapse."  Since it was free and since I'm around, I decided to attend and did.Prof. Benson, Grad students Richard, Garrett, SelimovicNamed in honor of the department's distinguished,...

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